Speaking at the convention, Newell addressed the topic of closed platforms and said Valve is looking to the more open Linux as the future of gaming.

“The next step in our contribution to this is to release some work we’ve done on the hardware side. Even more broadly in terms of the grand unification, we really don’t think that the fragmentation around the physical location or the input devices of computation is either necessary or desirable for software developers or for consumers,” he said.

“None of the propriety closed platforms are going to be able to provide that grand unification between mobile, the living room, and the desktop. Next week we’re going to be rolling out more information about how we get there and what are the hardware opportunities that we see for bringing Linux into the living room and potentially pointing further down the road to how we can get it even more unified with mobile.”

]]>http://www.vg247.com/2013/09/16/valve-hardware-news-rolling-out-next-week-newell-promises-linuxcon/feed/27Valve’s Steam Box will not be formally announced in 2013: engineer clarifies issuehttp://www.vg247.com/2013/01/09/valves-steam-box-will-not-be-annnounced-in-2013-engineer-clarifies-issue/
http://www.vg247.com/2013/01/09/valves-steam-box-will-not-be-annnounced-in-2013-engineer-clarifies-issue/#commentsWed, 09 Jan 2013 09:49:50 +0000http://www.vg247.com/?p=328396Valve founder Gabe Newell officially announced that the company’s PC console – dubbed internally at the studio as ‘Bigfoot’, and its handheld counterpart ‘Littlefoot’ – at CES. However, speculation that it will be formally announced at GDC is wide of the mark, a Valve engineer has confirmed.

Speaking with Engadget, Valve engineer Ben Krasnow clarified that at no point has the company stated a 2013 announcement date for the hardware. It comes as German site Golem.de states that he announced a 2013 date

“With regards to the Steam Box news,” he said, “there has been a lot of things that we are working on getting Steam into the living room, and are planning for a hardware box, but we have no current plans to announce anything in 2013.”

Bigfoot, the only official name for “Steambox” we have at the moment, won’t be alone. Littlefoot (whatever that is) will cover touch and mobile devices, providing a complete home gaming solution for PC, TV and portable, all glued together with Steam. Valve head Gabe Newell said yesterday that Bigfoot’s controller won’t include motion controls (Wii Sports has already done it, apparently), but biometric feedback could well be related to the pad. The words sounded more Nintendo that Valve.

Newell’s admission comes at a telling time. Microsoft could be on the cusp of announcing the next Xbox – some rumours are suggesting you may get a first look at it a lot sooner than you think – and there’s little doubt Sony will use E3 in June to start seriously talking about the future of PlayStation. Valve is coming. Assuming Gabe can keep the price down, there’s every chance you may never need to buy into Microsoft or Sony hardware again.

Entry point

Valve’s entry into the console space bears stark similarities to Microsoft’s arrival with Xbox in 2001. Japanese firms Sony and Nintendo were in absolute control of consoles at that point, and it was unthinkable that a fresh approach, especially from the US, could make an impact. The chink in the market’s armour was then largely based on cultural aesthetics (that console games were made by the Japanese and the PC approach had no place on the TV), but this time the perceived normality of content delivery, specifically that it’s based on the sale of discs, has gifted Valve, and the apparently infinitely ambitious Gabe Newell, an access point. Steam is about downloading. It’s amazingly popular. Its approach is about to be taken across every screen in the home. Bigfoot will challenge the perception that the video games industry must sell itself on Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo’s premium disc model for another generation. Given Steam’s dizzying success and the explosion in subs-based music and video streaming, we already know that, for many, discs have been dead for years.

Then there’s the Steam library, an Alexandrian effort in comparison to XBLM and PSN. Thousands of games for less than $10. More than 50 publisher catalogues. Seasonal sales which bring “PC” versions down to single-digit euro levels. The impact on traditional retail and current supply chains could, in theory, be seismic. Valve’s already said it’ll sell Bigfoot to consumers itself. It doesn’t need shops. And if you have a fast internet connection, neither do you. Newell’s announcement today means that unless you want to play certain exclusives, PlayStation or Xbox may be about to become unnecessary.

The main unanswered questions regarding Bigfoot are related to date, power and price. If Valve can keep Bigfoot’s cost down to a sensible level, it probably won’t be able to make units fast enough, but there’s a chance it’ll be expensive. Also, we don’t know the spec. We all know how much users, especially console users, obsess about grunt. Lastly, we could be looking at something that won’t arrive for years, in which case the next traditional generation will have time to properly settle before Valve takes its shot. Newell’s already said there are no plans for a 2013 reveal.

Regardless, where some of the core audience was gearing up to buy into 720 or PS4 yesterday, today it’ll be waiting for Bigfoot. This is real: Valve is to launch a living room video games machine.

The joke surrounding Steambox has always been that of Half-Life 3 launching as a system exclusive and just how funny it’d be in terms of hardware sales. And here we are. Who’s laughing now? Bet your ass it isn’t Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo.

Steam Box – At a glance

Valve’s SteamBox is codenamed Bigfoot. It runs on Linux but can take a Windows installation.

Bigfoot will have a low-latency controller, probably with biometrics. Valve’s not keen on motion controls.

Valve envisions Bigfoot acting as a server, linked to every screen in your house.

A project called Littlefoot will address the mobile and touch spaces.

Steam wants to become more open, allowing user curation of content.

Speaking with The Verge, finally confirmed long-tailed rumours of a console-like SteamBox, designed to capitalise on the standardised hardware benefits of consoles without losing the flexibility and universality of PC gaming.

“We’ll come out with our own [SteamBox] and we’ll sell it to consumers by ourselves. That’ll be a Linux box,” he said.

“If you want to install Windows you can. We’re not going to make it hard. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination.”

Valve’s SteamBox, codenamed Bigfoot, will include “a controller that has higher precision and lower latency” than existing peripherals. It probably won’t have any kind of motion tracking – Newell said Wii Sports has already achieved the pinaccle of motion-controlled gaming – but may include other interetsing features.

“Biometrics. We have lots of ideas,” he said. “I think you’ll see controllers coming from us that use a lot of biometric data.”

The executive explained that hands and fingers have finer control than arms, so motion control dials precision down rather than up, while biometrics can do the opposite.

“Biometrics on the other hand is essentially adding more communication bandwidth between the game and the person playing it, especially in ways the player isn’t necessarily conscious of. Biometrics gives us more visibility. Also, gaze tracking. we think gaze tracking is gonna turn out to be super important,” he added.

The SteamBox itself, as well as supporting Windows if desired, will have a web browser, so users can “absolutely” do anything with it that they could with any other Internet-connected PC, such as watching streaming services like Netflix.

Moreover Newell wants Steam itself to become more open.

We tend to think of Steam as tools for content developers and tools for producers. We’re just always thinking: how do we want to make content developers’ lives better and users’ lives a lot better? With Big Picture Mode we’re trying to answer the question: “how can we maximize a content developers investment?” It’s not a lot easier for me to build content that spans running on a laptop, running in a living room, and running on the desktop, as opposed to completely re-writing your game.

“Right now there’s one Steam store. We think that the store should actually be more like user generated content. So, anybody should be able to create a store, and it should be about extra entertainment value,” he said.

Examples of user-built stores include those themed around particular publishers or personal preferences, allowing like-minded users to easily curate and share their gaming experiences.

As for how and where the SteamBox will be used, Newell said it will also act as a server and expects future tech to serve up to eight game calls at a time, allowing it to be used on every screen in the house.

Valve is also keen to get in on the mobile market and has a second project called Littlefoot looking into touch screens and the smartphone and tablet space.

Newell said Valve sees a future where there are multiple SteamBox devices from different manufacturers, at various levels of power to suit different gamers’ needs, explaining how Bigfoot fits in with Xi3’s Piston.

Newell has much of interest to say in the full article besides this brief summary, so do lick through and check it out.